Mark Twain

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."

- Mark Twain

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Environmental Philosophy

The Big Old Oak Tree

Derrick Jensen book called What We Leave Behind,
is about what we leave behind. It is a devastating critique of our
culture's treatment of the natural world, on which all of life depends.

What We Leave Behind focuses on our
culture's waste products. Until fairly recently in the history of the
planet, the waste of one living thing became the food of another living
thing; a tree drops its leaves and the dead leaves are broken down by
various processes and living creatures to become the nutrient-rich
forest floor, a lion kills a gazelle and the scraps are eaten by hyenas
--- a human dies and the body is returned to the earth's natural
processes, and all life is better off for it - "healthier, stronger,
more resilient, more diverse."

However, we started
producing waste products that no living thing can break down, which
means they are essentially poisonous. Sea creatures starve to death with
their bellies full of plastic.

Jensen writes, "This culture is killing the planet. This culture is killing the planet. This culture is killing the planet."

Jensen is not negative; the culture that he is criticizing is negative. Jensen is angry...

The
life of Native American peoples revolves around the concept of
sacredness, beauty, power, and relatedness of all forms of existence.
In short the "ethics" or moral values of Native people are part and
parcel of their cosmology or total world view.

Most
Native languages have no word for "religion" and it may be true that a
word for religion is never needed until a people no longer have
"religion."

"Every
act of his [the Indian's] life is, in a very real sense, a religious
act."... "Religion," is, in reality, "living." Our "religion" is not
what we profess, or what we say, or what we proclaim; our "religion" is
what we do, what we desire, what we seek, what we dream about, what we
fantasize, what we think - all of these things - twenty-four hours a
day."

One's
religion, then, is one's life, not merely the ideal life but the life
as it is actually lived.... Religion is not a prayer, it is not a
church, it is not "theistic," it is not "atheistic," it has little to
do with what white people call "religion"

It is our every act. If we tromp on a bug, that is our religion. If we
experiment on living animal, that is our religion: if we cheat at
cards, that is our religion; if we dream of being famous, that is our
religion; if we gossip maliciously, that is our religion; if we are rude
and aggressive, that is our religion. All that we do, and are, is our
religion. (pg. 154)

What
would it look like if I did my best to make everything I do an
expression of the "sacredness, beauty, power, and relatedness of all
forms of existence"?

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